Telephone company that failed to serve rural customers agrees to pay $975,000 civil penalty

In February we reported that The Federal Communications Commission said it wants to do something about telephone companies' failure to complete long-distance calls in rural areas. In a notice seeking comment on its proposed rulemaking, the FCC said rural long-distance callers get false busy signals, can't hear each other or simply have long periods of "dead air."

Level 3 Communications said Tuesday that it has agreed to pay $975,000 to the U.S. Treasury as part of a consent decree to resolve a probe by the FCC, reports Hayley Tsukayama of The Washington Post. The company said it will pay an additional $1 million if it fails to meet benchmarks to improve connection rates by 5 percent each quarter.

Tsukayama writes that according to the investigation, the company was not reliably connecting long-distance calls from rural areas, a practice the FCC said is caused when long-distance carriers and intermediate providers use third-party routers to complete the calls at a low cost.